Atlantis
by PerennialChild
Summary: AU. After several (thousand) years making it on his own, Gabriel decides to visit the remnants of the Homeland, along with a flannel-clad pirate and a Sasquatch of an academic. Unfortunately the continent is in much the same state he left it—up to and including the fact that its residents are still very much alive. Destiel.


ATLANTIS

_AU. After several (thousand) years making it on his own, Gabriel decides to visit the remnants of the Homeland, along with a flannel-clad former pirate and a Sasquatch of an academic. Unfortunately the continent is in much the same state he left it—up to and including the fact that its residents are still very much alive. Not centric to any particular character's perspective. I believe in Destiel, but it's not a central focus of the story._

Gabriel was hiding in a port city of Egypt when his hometown went 20,000 Leagues Under. The fact that his hometown happened to be the Capitol of the biggest naval power in the world and that Egypt was now a free colony meant nothing to him at the time—he'd never had a head for politics, and the fact that his brothers had been brewing a World War over the last few years had never mattered to him so much as the fact that their forces were directed at _each other_. Armies and distant islands and strategy and ideological conflict were too abstract for him; the idea of it all flew over his head. All he understood then, all that he c_ared _about was that Micah was fighting Lucy, Dad had disowned half of the family, and everyone expected him to choose sides and join in the fray. And Gabriel didn't want to. He wanted to go outside to play hide n' seek with Lucy, he wanted to pull pranks on Micah and bully Raph and coo at baby Cassie who'd be leaving soon. But no one was willing to do that anymore, no one _understood_, so he ran away.

It was dark outside when he received the news, whispered in the city streets, passing from door to door, a veritable plague. No one _knew _why the island had sunk; some said there had been an explosion, others said that the gods had grown fed up with the hubris of the Atlanteans and struck them down with a single, cataclysmic tidal wave sent by the god of the seas. _Athenians, _Gabriel thought with disgust. _Athenians would be responsible for that theory. _They were the next targets for conquest, after all. Gabriel didn't care to theorize, though. For all he knew, Lucy had gone from crazy to bat-shit insane, drilled a hole in the center of the Capitol and allowed it to fill with water until the whole island drowned. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered. They were all dead, in one day, from one catastrophe.

He stumbled into his room that night, hardly able to breathe for the tightness in his throat, or see for the water in his eyes. The letter the envoy had come with was where he had left it—crumpled into a ball and tossed by the bedside. A summons to return home, in his Father's messy script. He was due back a month ago. _You're needed here, Gabriel. _The light from his crystal still shone strongly, illuminating the words. It occurred to Gabriel that it might have dimmed, that there might have been some sort of a sign to accompany what happened. That he might have felt some twinge, somewhere, sensed somehow that his family had been wiped out.

"Sorry, Dad," Gabriel whispered, smoothing out the crinkles. "I guess it pays not to listen to you, huh?"

The enormity of what had just occurred never hit Gabriel. That his whole people—exempting whoever was abroad like himself at the moment—were now extinct didn't matter to him. He didn't spare a thought for the countless unknowns and innocents whose lives had ended. He only had room in his heart for a handful of lives, and even these were too much for him, made him want to claw out his insides to be rid of them. He never quite managed it. Only thousands of years and thousands of adventures buffered him from that pain, the time not healing him so much as burying the experience. It got to the point where most mornings he could wake up not knowing what the tattoos on his arms signified, what his carefully-hidden crystal did for him. He could be relied upon to even forget his own name, all the way up until the Americans began recruiting for the expedition.

It recalled to him the tradition of visiting the graves of dead relatives. It wasn't something he'd ever done—he'd run from the memory of his family every bit as determinedly as he ran away from them in actual fact. But something odd stirred within him that day, when he saw the crumpled and muddy flier with the obscene words penned in the margin. Something about the way it was tossed aside, into the street, made him stop to smooth out the creases. And somehow, it was the same words that were written to him before.

_You're needed here, Gabriel._

It wasn't difficult to convince the recruiters that he was the best damned mess cook on this side of the Pacific—they were forced to believe him, or take him on, anyway, as no one else had volunteered for the job.

oOo

If Sam were like most linguists at the Smithsonian Institution, he would have had a heart attack when he found a large shape framed by the window of his apartment. That was because most Smithsonian linguists were old codgers who didn't have a lick of experience in hand to hand combat. Sam, though, was neither old nor frail, and he'd been raised by an ex Marine Corps officer. With all those points in his favor, he felt pretty confident taking on the shape by his frosted-over window.

The shape had him pinned within a minute.

"Dean?" he said wonderingly, unsure of himself. Then, "Dean!"

"Hey, Sammy," the shape, which Sam now recognized to be his brother, said fondly.

"How—how did you get in? What happened to the dog?"

Grinning widely enough for the dim light to catch on his teeth, Dean sat back on his heels and stood up, helping Sam to stand as well.

"Came through the chimney. Ho ho ho. C'mon, Sammy, you know me. A locked door and a helluva noisy pet isn't gonna stop me from visiting."

_Visiting_. Of course, that's how Dean would put breaking and entering. Sam paced around the room. "But, you're dead, Dean!" he said in exasperation. He stopped dead in his tracks. "You're dead. Dean, I looked for you, I don't know how long. You were dead. You were eaten, or drowned, or worse."

Sam felt a hand on his shoulder, and then they were embracing, hard-clasped to each other in his dark, drafty excuse for an apartment. Sam clutched at the back of his jacket, needing to feel it, that he was real. "I know, Sammy. I'm sorry." He drew away. "For the record, I thought I was dead too. I was pretty damned close. I was bleeding pretty bad—you know that. And the damned thing just kept knocking me around, underwater. Tenderizing me, I guess. My lungs took on water. I started sinking—for forever, felt like." He stopped there, and Sam did his best to hold back the pressure pushing against his eyes.

"How, ah, how did you survive? What about Dad?"_ How did I fail to save you_, was the question that remained unspoken.

Dean shook his head mutely. Their Dad hadn't made it. "I'm not sure. I just know that suddenly I was on dry land. Everything hurt, and I mean _everything_, but there was light everywhere, blue light, and it stopped hurting so much. Felt fucking fantastic, really. And I remember—hands. There were hands touching me. Had a fucking burn on my shoulder to prove it, for a while. Then I was in the water again, and it took fucking everything to kick back to the surface. Thanks for leaving that rescue boat, by the way. I kind of had to go Life of Pi before I was in familiar waters, was able to hijack the next boat I came across."

Sam's jaw had dropped open somewhere in the speech, and it was only now that he managed to get it moving again. "That's—that's pretty surreal, Dean."

Dean scowled. "No need to dance around it, I know I sound fucking crazy. But over the past few months I've found some people—people who believe me. There was this one vessel I boarded, with a guy that was—"

"You went back to pirating?"

Dean's jaw tightened. "Yes. It's what I do. It's what I'm good at. But I found some people, and get this, Sam-it all leads back to _us_. There's this guy named Bobby—he's loaded—and apparently he knew Dad after Mom died, even us, when we were littler. He did a helluva lot of research on Yellow Eyes, even more than Dad 'cause he only ever tracked the thing. And see, he thinks what we know about it correlates to the legend of the Leviathan or whatever, which, yeah, we know, but that it also guards the lost city of Atlantis! I could have been saved on fucking _Atlantis_, Sam, and not even known!"

"What have you done for this Bobby guy?" There was a cold, sinking feeling in Sam's core, almost like downing.

"Huh?"

"I said, what have you been doing for this Bobby guy? I don't pretend to understand what happens in a near-death experience, but this all sounds pretty far-fetched. I think he's playing you."

Dean scoffed, but his eyes skittered away. There was something he wasn't saying, Sam could tell, but he didn't call him out on it. It was too soon for mistrust. "I've been helping, for your information, put together an expedition to go back there. I'm the ships and machines guy, and I told him you were great with maps and gobbly gook. Don't you think I could _tell_ if I was being played, Sam? It's kind of a requirement in my profession to be able to tell the difference. And we've hunted sea monsters. Why is Atlantis suddenly crazy?"

"I don't know what to think." Sam took the chair by the other side of the window, holding his head. "I didn't go after Yellow Eyes again, didn't go back. It killed everything important to me, and, and you asked me not to. And you just want to skip back there, to find—some imaginary land where the origin of life happened or whatever?"

"Thought that happened in Africa," Dean said reflectively. "No, Sam. I don't want you goin' back on a revenge mission—we already did that, and it didn't turn out so well. I just—I want to find whoever or whatever saved me. You don't understand. I—I have to. I can't explain it."

Sam smiled bitterly. "And you want me to come with."

"We need someone who can read Atlantean. It'll be the opportunity of a lifetime, your nerd-brain would get all sorts of stimulation. And—I want you with me. We're a team. Right?"

Sam just stared at the silhouette of his brother, taking in the lines and angles of him. Last time they'd spoken, it was Dean telling him to pull away, to take the ship as fast as possible in the other direction. He'd yanked him out of the water half-dead, only to become the monster's chew toy himself. And Sam, damn him, he'd done what Dean asked. Come back a few hours later, to find no trace of Dean or the yellow-eyed monster that had been bent on destroying his life since he was six months old. And now Dean—alive by someone else's efforts, he wanted him to go _back _there. Because they were a team.

At that moment, it didn't matter that Sam was getting a grant for research on ancient Sumerian texts. It didn't matter that he had a job at the Smithsonian. He would have done anything Dean asked, gone anywhere.

"I'm in," he said tightly. "Dean." It felt wonderful to say his name again.

"Well then," Dean said, clasping his shoulder. "Let's head out to see the boss."


End file.
